En masse the transports complained to what was left of the county administration, accusing the voluntary associations of hoarding, bigotry, being badness. The county began rounding up supplies and distributing them, as was the right thing to do in any communist county. There was resistance from the ants that had prepared when the grasshopper, in a situation of survive or die and too many had already died, came to take his gathered seeds. In some cases, literally.
Farms were ordered to bring in all their food stuffs. Of course farms have vast stores of food. They're farms!
Uh . . . no. I mean, farmers tend to build up some personal stores in cans and such. Sure. But they don't store bulk grain, for example, on site. When they harvest it, it gets shipped to silos and distributed further. If they do have a couple of silos filled with what looks like grain, that's what's called seed. It's what you make more food from. Unless, of course, you eat it.
Farmers were preparing for planting season at that point. Some of them had seed in their silos. It was confiscated. Those that weren't already using "organic farming" methods or had genmod seeds were roundly castigated. A couple of the local farmers resisted, forcibly, having their seed taken from them. They lost in the end. More deaths.
And all the time the grasshoppers were wanting to know what the gub'mint was going to do to help them. They were protesting and shouting and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Were all of them being idiots? No, no more than "random association" worked perfectly in high trust zones. But, statistically, "blue" counties had lower levels of local volunteerism on every level, from helping their neighbor to assisting in large-scale voluntary associations.
Why? These were, by and large, the people who spoke the most fulsomely of communal living, of everyone binding together in some sort of vast communistic surge to make the world a perfect utopia. And all organic, mind you. This general class of people, looked at in macrocosm, had the most experts in it on communal association of any class of people in the U.S. They should have been the biggest "voluntary associators" in the country.
Looked at in macrocosm. The hard-core believers in communal association, though, made up a small fraction of the overall "blue" group. Less than five percent. And most of them were already in "voluntary random associations." It's called a commune. And a commune where everyone voluntarily and randomly believes in communal living sometimes works. Sometimes. Generally, though, it don't.
Let's look at the most famous commune in history, even if most people don't know it was one: The Plymouth Colony.
That's right, the Pilgrims were communists. Oh, they didn't have the words and they sure didn't have Marx's great "From everyone according to their abilities to everyone according to their needs" line. But the original charter of the Plymouth Colony, the Mayflower Compact, was clear: Share and share alike.
This lasted through one year in The New World. A year with a death rate that made the Plague, at least in the U.S., look like a minor cold. They simply didn't grow enough food to make it to the next harvest. Various reasons. They were lousy farmers. They didn't understand the soil and weather conditions. But the most important thing they learned, forget putting fish heads under the corn if you got that in elementary school, was that if you treated the people who were doing the majority of the work exactly the same as those who would not or could not contribute as much to the community, the workers eventually decided to work less hard. And farming at that level is, trust me, very hard work.
Let's look back at Blackjack and that remarkable young lady. She looked at the situation very clearly and made a list of who really needed food and shelter. First, the guys who were officially trying to rectify things. They were out working hard every day to try to fix the disaster that was still ongoing. If things were ever going to get better it was going to depend, to a great degree, on them. Some of them were female. They got fed the same as males; take all you can eat, eat all you take. Then kids and the elderly. Okay, that fell into two categories but, face it, kids and old people don't eat much. And it was, after all, a church. Think "Christian charity."
Then the "random associators" got fed. These were the men and women that were doing things in the community to help out. They weren't going to save the world but they were saving lives and supporting the church's efforts. Farms get a mention here. At one point, according to the stories from that case study, they ate okra soup for three days. Why? Because there was a farm that just happened to have a bunch of okra. They offered it to the church for the refugees. One of the deacons from the church, a "voluntary random associator" went out and picked it up and brought it back. Those were the people who were next in line for food and beds.
Last, and certainly least, were the refugees who could help but did not. They were fed last, if there was food. Why? Because they simply didn't matter. If they all died, it wasn't going to offend God or Man because live or die they weren't fixing the situation. They were waiting for the King to make it Right. They were grasshoppers. They were the people that Da Vinci spoke of when he said "Most men are good for naught more than turning good food into shit."
Another true study. In any disaster situation, after the disaster is over and things are back to some degree of normal, ten percent of the refugees in temporary shelter have to be forcibly removed. No matter how bad it is, if they don't have to do anything they're content to sit on their ass. By the same token, there's another ten percent that, no matter how bad it is, has to help. Disaster professionals leave a certain number of blank spots in their response group because they know that there are going to be people who simply cannot sit on their ass and not help out. Giving them pre-specified jobs keeps them from being a nuisance. They're also very temporary slots because the same people will leave the refugee environment as fast as possible. Probably to head back to their communities and see how they can help out.
Grasshoppers. Ants.
Back to Lamoille County. The vast majority of the "transport" population, the crafty artisans and semi-retireds and such weren't true communalists. They were grasshoppers.
Look, I'll give you an example of the difference in another disaster: Hurricane Katrina.
Forget the suboptimal response of New Orleans, a city of grasshoppers led by a grasshopper, vs. Mississippi. Forget all the rest. This is a personal story from when I was a kid.
Like everybody else I watched the news when the disaster hit New Orleans. And I grew up on Fox or nothing. But even that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of what was happening, because of how it was being covered.
I recall this one incident clearly. It's never a thing they replay over the years when stuff comes up about Katrina but I recall it clearly as day.
Shepard Smith was interviewing people down by where the water stopped. When the TV crew first got there there was this guy standing up to his hips in that rotten fucking water. Skinny little black guy, looked like he might have had a drug habit or maybe he was a street person. I dunno, but he was skinny as fuck. He was, when they arrived, helping an old lady out of the water. Walking back to the land with her. When she got to land he turned around to go back out.
Shepard Smith stopped him and asked him what he was doing. The guy said he'd been there all morning, it was a bit after noon and looked hot as shit, helping people through the water. He hadn't had anything to eat or drink. (It's been noted that the news people never seemed to offer except to one lady with a baby that looked as if it was dying.) There was some back and forth then the guy went back out to help another lady.